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The epigraph for Howl is from Walt Whitman: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Announcing his intentions with this ringing motto, Allen Ginsberg published a volume of poetry which broke so many social taboos that copies were impounded as obscene, and the publisher, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested. The court case that followed found for Ginsberg and his publisher, and the publicity made both the poet and the book famous. Ginsberg went on from this beginning to become a cultural icon of sixties radicalism. This works seminal place in the culture is indicated in Czeslaw Milosz's poetic tribute to Ginsberg: "Your blasphemous howl still resounds in a neon desert where the human tribe wanders, sentenced to unreality".
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
Lately, Ginsberg hasn't always been in top form, but "Howl" remains a masterpiece. White Shroud is the best of his later works. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of self-appointed critics who, in order to try to convince others of their own individuality and intellectual honesty, feel the need to let everyone know that they consider Ginsberg (and every other so-called "Beat" for that matter) to be an overrated hack and more of a celebrity than a poet and blah, blah, blah, blah. It is true that Ginsberg's style has been imitated by far too many lesser poets who, obviously, don't posess anything close to the man's talent and it is also true that there's an equal number of people who claim to love Ginsberg but have never actually bothered to sit down and really read anything beyond the first page of "Howl." Inetivably, one wishes that all of these presumed literary critics (regardless of where they stand) would just shut up, read the poems for themselves, and form their own opinions regardless of what the current trend is. For if they did, they would discover a very talented poet who, even if he occasionally seemed to be repeating and parodying himself as he got older, still created some of the strongest American poetry of the latter 20th Century. While Kaddish remains his strongest work of poetry, his much more famous poem "Howl" still carries more of a raw, exhilirating anger. Written to be read aloud, Howl is basically a cry against the conformity of 1950s America but the anger found within still reverberates almost half a century later. Certainly, his vision of a drug-abusing community of outcasts wandering along darkened city streets remains as relavent as ever. Like any apocalyptic poem, it can be credibly charges that at times, Howl is superficial and there's not much beyond shocking images. I don't necessarily disagree with this -- Howl, for instance, doesn't carry the same emotional weight as Ginsberg's more personal Kaddish. However, if Howl is all image, they're still very powerful images. Would I feel the same passion for this poem if I didn't know the much-reported stories of Ginsberg's "best minds of my generation destroyed by madness?" In short, if the beats hadn't been so celebrated by the media, would this poem have the same power? Honestly, who cares? The fact of the matter is that yes, the beats were celebrated (or hyped depending on your point of view) by the media and Howl is a powerful poem. All other considerations are simply unimportant doublespeak. As for the other poems contained with Howl, they are a mixed batch but all have their value. Some are a little too obviously based on Whitman (much as countless other poets based too much on Ginsberg) but they all have their points of interest. Its obvious that none of them were chosen to overshadow Howl but to a certain extent, that works very well. After the rage and madness of Howl, its good to have these other poems to "come down" with.
With all this talk of anger and rage, I should also mention that Ginsberg's sense of joy is a component of his poetry that too many critics either fail to mention or ignore all together. Whatever you may think of his talent, it is obvious that Ginsberg loved poetry and found his greatest happiness through the discovery of new forms of poetic expressions. For all of its apocalyptic ragings, Howl never grows shrill because one can sense the fact that Ginsberg had a lot of fun composing (and performing) the poem. A few years before his own death, I was lucky enough to attend one of Allen Ginsberg's readings. Though he read mostly from Kaddish and his shorter poems (perhaps, understandably, trying to make sure we understood he actually had written other poems beyond the one everyone kept citing), he also read a bit from Howl. He proved to be an amazing reader, going over these words he must have seen over a million times past, with an almost childlike enthusiasm and joy. As he did this, I looked out at the others in the audience and basically, I saw rows and rows of identical looking "intellectuals," all posessing the same dead-serious expression on their face, nodding at each relavent point as if to make sure everyone understood that they understood genius. Contrasting their forced seriousness with Ginsberg's uninhibited joy, I realized that there was only one true tragesy as far as Allen Ginsberg was concerned and that was the fact that his self-appointed acolytes always took him for more seriously then he did himself. To consider Howl and Ginsberg without joy is like considering language without words.
6 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Ginsberg is perhaps an "important" poet, and I admit that "Howl" has a certain frothy energy. But aside from the oceanic rhetoric, there's not much in these poems; it's the kind of poetry that no doubt sounds great when recited before a crowd, but doesn't really bear much scrutiny. I was tired of hearing about the best minds of Allen Ginsberg's generation long before the bombastic, repetitive verses of the title poem came to a close. A few of the additional poems included, though, are decent enough, and manage to communicate a sense of the transcendent in the stuff of everyday life.
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>
As a teenager I wanted to run down the
middle of my hometown steet screaming and
throwing myself in the air, anything to break
up the dull drab everydayness of it, I don't
know if this is a common fantasy that teenagers
have?
>
A friend of mine said that Shakespeare
is hard to read but easier to understand when
seen performed on stage. I've read Howl (or
got 2/3 of the way through it) a couple of times
without really understanding it or enjoying it.
I've heard it recited on stage a couple of times
by Jean & John Waggoner's City Lights Review,
and even saw/heard Allen Ginsberg himself
perform it at Cheltenham Literary Festival circa
about 1992. And while appreciating the passion
of these live readings and recognising a few
references: "Neal Cassady cocksman..." etc.
I didn't really get it. I knew that two very
intelligent friends of mine got a big buzz out
of it, so knew I must be missing something.
So when I got Allen Ginsberg 'Howl &
Other Poems' CD and seeing that Howl was
the first track on it, I put it on my player, lay
on the bed, closed my eyes, settled down and
listened. Through Allen's distinctive matter-
of-fact voice the poem unfolded, revealing
itself to me. It was the same story as Jack
Kerouac's On the Road (correct me if I'm
wrong) containing nearly all the same
characters and a few others, yet told in
impressionistic verse, instead of Jack's long
prose poem. A take on the same era/scene/
emotion but from a different angle.
It's the paean of the underdog, concentrate:
wonderful imagery. Let Allen lead you around the
scene and show you that time, incident by pictured
incident. As he reads it see it on the inside of your
eyelids. You're back there with him. He describes
Neal Cassady and his love-making escapades
perfectly, sums up the life events of many 1940's
beatniks to be repeated by the same crashes and
compromises of 1960's hippies. Lives and dreams
crushed by the materialistic grey morning
commonsense it's-always been-this-way boulder
of inevitability, learning ways to grease their bodies
so they slide around the boulder and feel less its weight.
If you've read On the Road three times and
would like to take the trip again in a different seat in
the car, try Allen's. Although is it my impression
that Allen's view while exhilarating is a lot bleaker
than Jacks?
1 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Howl - Ginsberg's poetry read by the author on CD, November 10, 2006
'Howl', like most -- perhaps all -- Beat poetry, has not aged well. It's a lazy, ugly poem which could have been written by any well-read and angry college kid. I have read it many times and see nothing in it of any value other than the historical.
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